Frances Wright Quotes

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Frances Wright

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 6, 1795

If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.

Frances Wright

These will vary in every human being; but knowledge is the same for every mind, and every mind may and ought to be trained to receive it.

Frances Wright

There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.

Frances Wright

Awaken its powers, and it will respect itself.

Frances Wright

Religion may be defined thus: a belief in, and homage rendered to, existences unseen and causes unknown.

Frances Wright

Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.

Frances Wright

Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.

Frances Wright

Pets, like their owners, tend to expand a little over the Christmas period.

Frances Wright

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.

Frances Wright

A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.

Frances Wright

And when did mere preaching do any good? Put something in the place of these things. Fill the vacuum of the mind.

Frances Wright

But while human liberty has engaged the attention of the enlightened, and enlisted the feelings of the generous of all civilized nations, may we not enquire if this liberty has been rightly understood?

Frances Wright

He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.

Frances Wright

Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not.

Frances Wright

It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor.

Frances Wright

Man has been adjudged a social animal.

Frances Wright

Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it.

Frances Wright

Speak of change, and the world is in alarm. And yet where do we not see change?

Frances Wright

Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.

Frances Wright

The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.

Frances Wright